custom development tools were
closely tied to distributed server
platforms-rather than the mainframe, which had become a very
closed environment. There was as
yet no cloud-based Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS), Platform as
a Service (PaaS) or Software as a
Service (SaaS) offerings available
that would allow enterprises to
offload the burdens of distributed
infrastructure ownership.
Those burdens, however, now
vastly exceed anything anyone
ever imagined. Enterprises have
piled generation after generation of server, storage and
networking gear on top of each
other. The complexity of these
massive pieced-together environments makes them inherently
unmanageable. IT spends untold
budget dollars on infrastructure
management staff-and tools
upon tools-yet still struggles
to maintain service and
security levels.
As these ownership burdens
have made on-premises less practical, IT has:
*
*
*
Thrown more people and
technology at the challenges
of service level management,
security, workload optimization, business continuity, etc.
Offloaded as many existing
and future workloads as possible to the cloud to achieve
lower cost, greater flexibility,
stronger security, etc.
Virtualized its infrastructure
elements in order to treat
them as a single resource
pool-which essentially
amounts to an attempt to
recreate the mainframe
These trends clearly point to an
obvious conclusion: It's probably
best for enterprise IT to dispense
with the burden of on-premises
distributed infrastructure
altogether.
The Two-Platform Enterprise
Most IT leaders can't imagine an enterprise
without on-premises distributed infrastructure.
That's because it has become a bad habit to throw
good money after bad into a bottomless pit of
incomprehensible complexity that offers no
competitive advantage.
But enterprises can thrive without on-premises distributed computing. A two-platform environment of
mainframe and cloud can work for any organization
seeking maximum digital effectiveness.
The mainframe runs the core systems of record
that define the business. Those applications have
been tightly honed to the needs of the business over
decades. And no platform offers a more scalable,
reliable, high-performance, secure and efficient total
cost of ownership place to run them.
That doesn't mean mainframe environments are
perfect as-is. On the contrary, mainframe development/test and operations processes at most organizations have become ossified-crippling IT's ability
to modify and innovate on the mainframe as nimbly
as required in today's fast-moving markets. Most
organizations also face the loss of their most experienced mainframe professionals.
These issues, however, don't require re-platforming. Instead, they necessitate new tools and processes. Those tools empower non-mainframe DevOps
staff to understand, change and improve poorly
documented COBOL applications. They simplify unit
testing on new mainframe code. And they integrate
mainframe DevOps into the multi-OS environment
through popular solutions like Jenkins and Git.
The cloud runs everything else. Payroll and email
systems don't provide competitive differentiation, so
why treat them as anything but commodities? SaaS
is cheaper, more mobile-friendly, and delivers new
capabilities immediately and non-disruptively.
And if any business-differentiating applications
need to run on VMs, why own the underlying infrastructure? It doesn't make operational or economic
sense to do so now that PaaS/IaaS solutions allow
organizations to rent capacity on-demand.
What's Your Motivation?
The move to two-platform IT can feel extreme. But
given the pressures on IT to do more with less-and
do it more quickly and with more stability than ever
before-two-platform IT is the best decision.
No other strategy gives IT the ability to so
dramatically:
*
Innovate at speed. Once you achieve Agile
and DevOps on the mainframe, you can bring
*
*
*
digital innovation to market
with unmatched speed.
This is possible because
you're modifying your core
business logic-whether it
resides in your systems of
engagement or systems of
record-directly as required,
rather than constantly
wasting time and money on
needless re-platforming.
Optimize service levels
at any scale. The combination of mainframe and
cloud can reliably deliver
outstanding performance at
any peak workload without
massive capital spending.
On-premises distributed
infrastructure, on the other
hand, locks IT into an
interminable losing battle
to remove chronic bottlenecks-even if it's highly
virtualized.
Shift resources from
non-productive maintenance to true value delivery. The massive volumes of
time, money and energy that
on-premises infrastructure
consumes just to "keep the
lights on" should be channeled into more beneficial
projects. Two-platform IT
eliminates this resource drain.
Minimize digital security
and compliance risks.
Two-platform IT is far easier
and less expensive to defend
and govern than Rube
Goldberg-style distributed
infrastructure.
While two-platform IT may, at
first glance, seem like a contrarian approach, it's actually highly
rational. It has proven to work
well for organizations. And it can
work well for any enterprise that
runs on the mainframe-and that
recognizes the superiority of the
cloud to traditional on-premises
distributed infrastructure.
ibmsystemsmag.com NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 // 11

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